Is God Good?, Part II
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Direct Continuation of: Is God Good?, Part I
I’ve gotten the sense that people are tired of all this Problem of Evil stuff. But this essay is important for a variety of reasons — it deals and forcefully resolves all the final excuses between demonstrating needless suffering and God being to blame for it would he exist. Without this essay, nothing I have written on the Problem of Evil would matter, because people could just bring up these excuses and then declare that they don’t have to deal with anything else I’ve written.
But this essay also has a few larger points that I hope to make use of later — it will really demonstrate how flawed the rhetoric of morality is and how that debate can be easily confused and manipulated by definitions, and it will also demonstrate how flawed the rhetoric of theism is and how that debate can also be confused and manipulated by definitions. And you guys all know I love trying to dissolve the confusion and manipulation of definitions.
I can’t move forward on discussing either religion or morality without this, and I can’t move forward on discussing a lot of other things until I discuss morality and religion some more. It’s odd, but try to bear with me. This is important, and I’m pretty sure it won’t work in any other sequence.
So with that out of the way, where are we in the discussion? Here are some questions I tackled in the previous part:
What does it mean to be good? It can mean a variety of different things, since it is just a word. The definition I choose to use is that God will be compassionate and benevolent, and thus not allow needless suffering to befall anyone.
Can we judge God? Yes. Just as we can judge God to be all-powerful or can judge God to be all-knowing or can judge God to be the author of the Bible, we can judge God to be malevolent or to have the characteristic “causes needless suffering”. All we are doing is testing whether God meets a certain definition threshold. Given that God either does or does not meet this threshold as a matter of fact, reality has already rendered judgment, and our own personal judging won’t matter.
Why should we deem God to be evil? Because God does allow needless suffering in a variety of cases, and the common excuses don’t actually work. See “The Christian God Sure Takes His Sweet Time”; “The Biblical God is a Malevolent Bully”; “The Great Problem of Evil”; and “God, Babies, Hell, and Justice”.
Does God have an unknown purpose? No. Why would an omnipotent God be so limited as to not only be forced to let people suffer, but also be forced to not let us know why? The unknown purpose defense could be used to defend any claim as true and let any criminal off the hook — zebras have an unknown reason why they can’t fly, and Hitler had an unknown reason why he had to allow the Holocaust. If you don’t accept these lines of reasoning, you can’t accept it for God either. “God works in mysterious ways” simply is not any better than “Hitler works in mysterious ways”.
Isn’t God good because he has a perfect nature? No. God either allows needless suffering or does not, and if it was in God’s nature to not allow needless suffering, we wouldn’t observe it. But we do, thus God’s nature is not perfect. You cannot simply assert that God is good to defend God from challenges of being good, as this is circular reasoning: “God must be good because he is good”.
Now I hope to answer the following excuses:
Isn’t God good because he’s infallible?
Can’t God do whatever he wants?
Isn’t God good because he is the source of all goodness?
Once these excuses are finally out of the way, we must conclude that at best there is no way we can assert God is good, and at worst God is malevolent or nonexistent.
God’s Highly Fallible Infallibility
God, as stated by many religious texts and religious believers, is infallible — given that he is all-knowing, God is literally incapable of error. God knows every single thing that is true, and does not hold any additional false positions beyond that. Needless to say, God knows a lot more than even the smartest among us, let alone yours truly college internet blogger man.
But given that God knows so much more than us, doesn’t he also know what is best for us in a way we can’t possibly comprehend? Sure, the things we talk about certainly look like needless suffering to us feeble humans, and certainly can’t be defended by feeble human theology like some may have hoped. But we’re beyond that, and God is beyond us! We can’t doubt God’s infallibility!
Now, you may notice that this is a mix of questions we tackled earlier: it seems to be two cups of “unknowable purpose” and two cups of “God’s good nature”, mixed thoroughly and salted to taste. Here, we are supposed to trust in God’s infallibility and good nature, and hope that he has some unknowable purpose that perfectly explains what is going on in a way that we just can’t comprehend.
It’s certainly reassuring to think that Everything Will Work Out for the Best, but we need not be so naïve: First, the “unknowable purpose” retort — even if God is infallible, why assume he is using this infallibility for good instead of evil? If God was secretly malevolent, how would we know? Then, the “God’s good nature” retort — this is the same circular reasoning, for we can’t dismiss a claim that God has made an error with the assumption that God is incapable of error. For more, see the two questions in the previous part of this series.
God’s Might Does Not Make Right
Now, a small group of people are strongly tempted to abandon any sense of God having a reason for needless suffering. These people boldly admit that yes, God does allow needless suffering, sometimes all over the place. But yet, they say that God is still good? Why? Well, God can do whatever he wants, and be justified in whatever he does. If God makes the world, God makes the rules. We should consider ourselves lucky that they work in our favor at least some of the time.
This sounds strange for good reason: we don’t accept this line of argument anywhere else. Just because your parents gave birth to you does not mean the police should look the other way if they torture you with hot irons. Likewise, being President of a country or CEO of a company does not mean that everyone should allow you to shoot citizens at random or spend all the company’s money on booze. Clearly, having ownership or authority over something does not mean you are immune from having your actions be criticized.
No parent, president, or CEO would be considered to match the defining characteristics of “good” if they preformed these kinds of actions. But if you still insist that, no, “good” as a word is nothing about preventing needless suffering, but rather doing whatever you want to the things you create, then for you, “good” is an entirely different word, one that I find confusing and impractical and would thus oppose on the basis of you manipulating semantics.
“Good” itself is just a word. If you insist that “red” has nothing to do with color, people would look at you weird, but you would be technically correct that stop signs are not “red”. But this wouldn’t change anything about the stop sign, nor the wavelengths of the light reflecting off the stop sign, nor our perceptions of the stop sign — they would be red despite not being “red”. Thus if God allows needless suffering and is not good, yet is still “good” by another definition, you would be smuggling a metric ton of connotations if you thought that meant the Problem of Evil is over.
The Problem of Evil is all about proving that God is not good, and nothing about proving that God is not “good”. Separate why we care from the definition, and you’ll see what is truly at stake here.
Being the Source of Goodness is No Excuse
But what if, you see, God was the source of all morality? Wouldn’t he have to be good, then, pretty much by definition? You can’t be good if you’re not in accord with God’s nature, because good wouldn’t exist without it!
Notice here that we have one scoop “God’s nature” argument and another scoop “Might makes right” argument — what is it about God’s nature that makes him the source of morality? And how would we know? Assering that God is the source of morality is not a valid defense against charges that no, God is not the source of morality. Instead, it’s more circular argument.
In addition, it’s also just a weird definition of “good” that has nothing to do with needless suffering. The easiest way to puzzle this out is what is called the Euthyphro Dilemma: is God’s nature the definition of good, or does God’s nature meet some external standard of goodness? The first horn means that goodness is arbitrary — God could command genocide and people would think it’s totally fine and acceptable, which totally did happen. The second horn means that God is at the victim of a standard more powerful than he is, and a standard which he clearly does not meet!
Yet, despite this some people insist on taking both horns at once — morality is based in God’s nature, and God’s nature is such that he cannot command genocide, because genocide is contrary to God’s nature. But why is it contrary to God’s nature? Could God not change his nature to something else, or is he not really omnipotent? Why does God have this nature and not a nature where genocide is okay? And why are we so worried about God allowing genocide, if his doing so would make genocide okay? Is it not that we dislike genocide for other reasons?
What I mean by this is that we clearly hate genocide not because God hates it, but because it causes massive amounts of suffering to innocent people for terrible reasons. Thus our notion of “good” is not the kind that makes God into an odd tautology (God is good, which just means that God acts according to his nature, which just means that God is God) but rather into something of substance (God will not allow needless suffering).
If God’s nature could have been something else such that genocide was good, then what is it that actually makes genocide so condemnable, if not the massive amounts of suffering? Compare this to God relenting his ban on shellfish… not nearly as scary, huh?
And even if God was the basis of morality and thus whatever God did was “moral”, why would we care? This would mean nothing to us if God still allows people to suffer needlessly. And our reaction is never as callous “Well, I don’t care that millions of people suffer, I only care that God doesn’t like it.”
Final Thoughts
So I hope to, with this, put the Problem of Evil to rest resoundingly, though I bet I still might feel compelled to make a few comments in an essay or two much down the road. But all my discussions of the Problem of Evil will be far more response oriented, now that I’ve taken on the big challenge of writing everything I have to really say about it.
But it seems like every excuse fails, and we have no where left to turn but to accept the Problem of Evil and embrace its implications. But what are these implications? I said that if we can’t find any reason why God would allow needless suffering or any other reason to dodge the issue, we must conclude that at best there is no way we can assert God is good, and at worst God is malevolent or nonexistent. Now let’s talk about why there’s no way we can assert God is good. It involves a double standard.
Every time that God does something that is considered “good”, like saving people from an earthquake or winning Tebow a football game, we do not hesitate to say so. The event is just so unambiguously good that God must be good. There’s no question of whether God had an unknown reason to use this event to promote evil, for example.
Yet, if a counterexample exists just as unambiguously — an earthquake where no one is saved or a game lost by Tebow — it isn’t the same kind of clarity. Here, god isn’t evil, he has an excuse. Thus, the theist wins either way: God is either unambiguously good or misunderstood and therefore still good. There is nothing that could ever show God to be evil, setting up a seriously warped moral compass as the theist stretches to allow God to do more and more crazy things and still earn the “good” label.
If God is only good on the assumption that an unknown purpose exists, then God is not actually good — rather his status is just that, unknown. If God can do whatever he wants, then he can do things which are not good, thus making God’s status just as unknown and ambiguous. If God works in mysterious ways, there is no way we can know his ways are good — they’re just too mysterious!
All this appeal to mystery means we lose any basis to appeal to goodness! Instead, we’re left drifting in a lala land of weirdly applied definitions, with no reference to actual experience to ground them to. Thus we have no basis to actually call God good, and the Problem of Evil clearly succeeds in this weaker aspect.
But the weaker claim of “God is not good” is not all we can shoot for — instead, we can defend the stronger claim that “God is either malevolent or nonexistent”. We do this by being honest with what the word “malevolent” means and see that there is no other word to describe an entity that could prevent so much needless suffering at absolutely zero personal cost, and yet does not do so.
But where does this leave us with the Problem of Evil in it’s fullest form? How do we reason from God isn’t good all the way to God does not exist? Well, it really depends on what kind of “God” we’re talking about. What do you mean by “God”, anyway? Quite a few religions, most notably Christianity, say that their God is benevolent, and thus not just good, but perfectly so. Given that this is not the case, then their God clearly cannot exist as described, and their religion is false.
It’s kind of weird to reason counterfactually in this sense. Why am I spending so much time arguing that God is malevolent when I think God does not exist? How can something that does not exist be malevolent? Well, as I tried to stress in the issue of the Bible, the answer is that the character God, as portrayed in the Bible stories, would be evil counterfactually, if it were to exist. The fact that God is supposed to be good if he exists is thus a reason to think of God in terms of nonexistence rather than malevolence.
So there you have it — we can conclusively argue from observed suffering all the way to the Christian God’s nonexistence. If you disagree, feel free to let me know, and we can sort it out in the discussion section. Certainly other Gods could still exist, but they are malevolent to the degree that they are all-powerful. I suppose other religious people would just have to embrace that malevolence for now, though I do think there are unrelated reasons to reject these religions as well.
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God is not only omnipotent and omnibenevolent, but also perfectly just. The following theodicy called “Theodicy from divine justice” aims at showing that by taking this attribute into account the problem of evil could be solved, at least with respect to human suffering.
(1) God’s perfect justice prevents Him from relieving people with unforgiven sins from their sufferings (see Isaiah 59,1-2).
(2) Unlike God Christians are not perfectly just. Therefore, unlike God, they are in a position to help people with unforgiven sins. By doing this they may make those among them who haven’t yet accepted God’s salvation receptive of it (Matthew 5,16, 1 Peter 2,11-12, and 3,1-2), which in turn frees these persons from suffering in the afterlife.
(3) The greater God’s beneficial power due to His love, the greater God’s destructive power due to His justice (see Matthew 13,27-29). Striving to prevent as much suffering as possible God can only interfere to such a degree that the beneficial effect of the interference is not neutralized by the destructive effect of it.
(4) Someone who dies before he or she reaches the age of accountability, i.e. before he or she can distinguish between good and evil (see Genesis 2,16-17, Deuteronomy 1,39, and Isaiah 7,16) faces no punishment in the afterlife, as he or she would not have been able to commit sins. So, God may not be inclined to prevent such a person’s death.
(5) Someone who dies before he or she reaches the age of accountability, i.e. before he or she can distinguish between good and evil (see Genesis 2,16-17, Deuteronomy 1,39, and Isaiah 7,16) faces no punishment in the afterlife, as he or she would not have been able to commit sins. So, God may not be inclined to prevent such a person’s death.
(6) A person’s suffering in this life may have a redeeming effect (Luke 16,25) and consequently contribute to a decrease of the respective person’s suffering in the afterlife; the amount of suffering in this life is so to speak subtracted from the amount of suffering in the afterlife. So, God may not be inclined to relieve this person’s suffering.
(7) There are degrees of punishment in the afterlife depending on one’s moral behaviour (Matthew 16,27, 2 Corinthians 5,10), one’s knowledge of God’s will (Matthew 11,20-24, Luke 12,47-48), and, as mentioned before, one’s amount of suffering in this life (Luke 16,25).
(8) Those people who suffer more in this life than they deserve due to their way of life are compensated for it by receiving rewards in Heaven.
A great portion of this essay seems to be a re-utterance of Socrates distinction between Gods and Good. I am not really interested in that debate. Instead I wanted to discuss a couple of the things you preface the article with.
On setting up a research project within the social sciences one of the first things you must think about are what are your empirical indicators? Social sciences deal with a lot of abstract concepts (love, morality, justice, culture, etc) that are not easily tie down. You cannot empirically test for love, instead you must narrow what it is you are looking at down to a more specific slice of reality. I would press you to think about the empirical indicators of your thought experiment.
You say that an all-powerful God can be judged by if he/she causes needless suffering, but how do you know what suffering is needless? The fact that there is “needless” suffering implies that there is also suffering that is necessary. What is the empirical indicator that you are using to draw the line between these two and how do you justify your demarcation?
I imagine that if I were you, my initial response to how what needless suffering would touch on human atrocities such as militarized mass rape, genocide, infanticide, mass starvation, etc. Is this an accurate assumption? If so than I would say that what human atrocities have in common is that they are situations where individuals are forced to endure excessive amounts of high level suffering, usually ending in death. While by no means are all human atrocities individually based, I would argue that what makes them atrocities is that they defile the concept of individuality, which is sacred to us as discrete entities. It pains us to see the notion of individual value defiled or abused in anyway, because it brings to question our own value. What I have been poorly trying to describe here is a mindset, a mindset that tends to prioritize the discrete effects of a situation, because its own existence is marked by discreetness both in experiencing reality as subjective consciousness fleeting existence. From this human mindset needless suffering is akin to excessive suffering placed on any number of individuals.
But in your essay you are not talking about an individual. You have opened up a thought exercise where the perspective subject is omnipotent. From the position of an all powerful God, I feel that I could see what you call “needless suffering” as necessary.
As I have said earlier, needless suffering implies that there is necessary suffering. What is necessary suffering? I would say that suffering in necessary in the sense that it is through attacks against it that a structure grows, and growth is important to survival. Through doses of suffering we resist, rebuild, and thus grow stronger. I see that cycle as fundamental to the continuation of life. For something to experience no suffering whatsoever would make it highly vulnerable. To summarize my argument is
-A system of life (be it a person, a plant, virus) requires some suffering to continue its growth. The moment all suffering stops, growth stops as well.
- The moment a system of life stops growing it begins to decay (decay here meaning become increasingly vulnerable to destruction).
- “Needless Suffering” is the application of more force than could benefit the system, which actually works to decay the system. It is like overwatering a plant. Instead of nourishing the growth of the plant it directly works towards its decay, even destruction.
Now the question is “Are human atrocities overwatering the plant?” It depends how you categorize the plant. Now, I know you do not like debating definitions, but bare with me here because it is important.
Do we see humans as plants, or homo sapiens as a plant? But more importantly for the purposes of your exercise, does God see humans as the plant, or homo sapiens as a plant. From my imagination I would argue the later. A being that could not only perceive all time at once, all space at once, but had absolute power over these things would most likely view species as discrete units. Hell perhaps it would view entire taxonomies of life as discrete units, or biomes. After all, the survival and happiness of the individual ultimately depends on the species, especially for social animals such as humans.
When we see fungi in the forest we count them discreetly, or in small clusters, but in reality they exist as the largest living organisms spanning miles. Who is to say that humans are not connected in some way that we cannot see? God being all knowing would perceive these connections. Thus in viewing humans he would not see every person individually, they would exist as cells within a much larger organism with perhaps cultures being larger organs. This drastically changes the nature of “needless suffering.”
Everything needs to suffer somewhat. The larger the organism the more inconsequential the suffering of individual parts seems. On my body, thousands of hair and skin cells die everyday. I pull my hair all the time and use my body in a way that is damaging as well. I am consciously increasing the suffering of these cells. However, I do it anyway because I do not think about them discretely. They exist as a part of me, and if the potential benefit is great enough, the cost of their suffering is acceptable.
Your argument is “If God is omnipotent, then the fact that there is so much needless suffering means he could not be good.” Who are you to say that the millions of people who suffer individual atrocities are not the necessary dead hair and skin of the human species? That ultimately their suffering is leading to a greater good (the preservation and happiness of the body).
Would you disagree that taking into account all people who have existed throughout all time. No expand that to all life that has existed. That in comparison right now, at this time, the amount of human suffering is relatively low? I would. I would also argue that human suffering has been on a steady decline over the past couple millennia. Is that not proof that there is some greater good at work? Or would you disagree that more of humanity is living longer, happier lives, than ever before? Who is to say that this is not proof of the goodness of God, and that humanity as a category is thriving?
By the way,
To anyone who read my above post, it is purely a theoretical argument to stretch the conception of an omnipotent God. It is for fun not meant to be taken seriously. And definitely not meant to be the impetus for condoning individual abuse.
@Patrick:
Good to talk to you again and see that you’ve made it to my site.
Three problems arise here:
[A] Why is suffering not proportional to the amount of sinning people have committed? Are we to believe that people in Africa are just big time sinners?
[B] What is it about being perfectly just that says you cannot help people with unforgiven sins? And if this means that people are going to suffer greatly, is perfect justice in conflict with benevolence? If so, how could God be said to be all-loving if he is occasionally not?
[C] God could lower the amount of suffering by also lowering the amount of sin, but he chooses not to lower the amount of sin. For example, see the arguments I raise in Where is God? — why does God not reveal himself to sinners and educate them in what mistaken actions they’re taking?
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This sounds very weird. First, it means Christians are doing something that God cannot do, making it sound like God is not actually all-powerful. It also makes it sound like Christians are either going against God’s wishes, or doing something that God could do better, and it would be in God’s interest to do so.
If the world is a better place thanks to the interaction of unjust Christians, why can God not preform the same interactions?
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Well, the death of this person would cause suffering to others as well. Not to mention this means that we have absolutely no interest in having people live to the age of accountability. In fact, it would be better to kill all babies, so they don’t risk the chance of messing up and losing out on the afterlife.
Speaking of which, how would God know that people who die before the age of accountability actually deserve to be in Heaven, and would have chosen good over evil if given the chance? If God has some sort of foreknowledge that he can use to do this, why doesn’t God just spend all good people to Heaven and cut out this pointless pit-stop/testing-ground life?
This also bothers me because its conveniently not verifiable, so any evil God could just promise that Heaven exists and completely justifies all his apparent evil behavior, and we would have no idea if he was true. This just blurs any distinction we could make between a good and an evil God.
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But what about those who cannot be compensated by receiving rewards in Heaven, like nonhuman animals? Also, what about the fate of those who do not make it to Heaven, and instead are placed in a cruel and unjust Hell?
@Tom Mitchell:
I preface my response to you with full acknowledgement that what you’re writing was more of an intellectual exercise to analyze an interesting and unusual argument, even if that argument is not the kind that you would support or accept. But that being said, I still think this argument is not only wrong, but shows a condemnable disregard for suffering individuals.
Necessary suffering is suffering that a person would willingly take on in order to achieve something the person feels is “worth it”, such as undergoing surgery in order to survive a disease, or getting a cavity filled. This gets a bit muddled when people have willingness to do things that are based on falsehoods, but I don’t think I really need to get into that. Thus, necessary suffering is suffering that is necessary to realize a higher good.
All suffering that isn’t necessary to realize a higher good is needless suffering. This is suffering that could be removed from the world and the world would be net better-off. For example, when we cured the world of polio, things only got better in quality of life terms. There is no indication that anyone can point to that polio was anything but needless suffering.
And simply saying it’s possible that polio was necessary suffering is not enough, for it’s also possible that zebras can fly. See my response to this in the part of this essay addressing the unknown purpose, and see more responses addressing various points in “The Great Problem of Evil”.
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Yes, but not anywhere near an exclusive list.
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I would disagree — what makes them atrocities is that people had to suffer when they didn’t need to or want to. It is in all of our interests to eliminate this kind of suffering from the world.
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This is also incorrect — many of the atrocities that you mentioned are not necessary for the growth of the human species, but are actually detrimental to this growth. There is no reason to think that the Holocaust was a net benefit to society, which is what you would have to assume to save God from the Problem of Evil.
Additionally, human individuals are qualitatively different from individual hair and skin cells. You are incorrect in saying that these cells can feel pain in any significant way, whereas human individuals can. This makes all the difference in why we give humans different regard than cells.
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Sure.
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I would say that is indeed not proof of the goodness of God. God had no reason to take his sweet time in getting us to this point, and still has a lot of work to do to eliminate the remaining unnecessary suffering from our world. It is even more telling that he could do this at absolutely zero personal cost.
All the benefit and higher quality of living that we now enjoy came from the hard work of our own species, not through any divine gift. If God wants to help, he should at least give us the cure for cancer he knows about but is not sharing with us.
Peter Hurford: “[A] Why is suffering not proportional to the amount of sinning people have committed? Are we to believe that people in Africa are just big time sinners?”
According to my theodicy suffering IS proportional to the amount of sinning people have committed. But it is the suffering in this life TOGETHER WITH the suffering in the afterlife that is proportional to the amount of sinning. So, from the amount of suffering in this life alone one cannot draw any conclusion concerning a person’s amount of sinning.
Peter Hurford: “[B] What is it about being perfectly just that says you cannot help people with unforgiven sins?”
If God helped a sinner instead of judging him He would no longer be perfectly just. But even if it was possible for God to help a sinner, it would not be of any use to the sinner, as a decrease of suffering in this life would result in an increase of suffering in the afterlife.
Peter Hurford: “And if this means that people are going to suffer greatly, is perfect justice in conflict with benevolence? If so, how could God be said to be all-loving if he is occasionally not?”
In my view for God as a perfectly just being it would indeed be impossible to act benevolently towards a person, if he or she has unforgiven sins. But because Christ was punished and died on behalf of sinners in order to make them just it is possible for God to be perfectly just and at the same time act benevolently towards man.
Peter Hurford: “[C] God could lower the amount of suffering by also lowering the amount of sin, but he chooses not to lower the amount of sin. For example, see the arguments I raise in Where is God? — why does God not reveal himself to sinners and educate them in what mistaken actions they’re taking?”
As for the question why God’s existence is not more manifest, 2 Peter 2,4 could provide an answer. From this passage one can draw the conclusion that if one is fully aware of God’s existence and nature, but nevertheless chooses to act against God’s will, such a decision may result in the ultimate loss of the relationship with God. That this may not only apply to the heavenly state might be seen from Hebrews 6,4-6: The meaning of this passage seems to be that turning from God despite being aware of His nature and supernatural powers results in the loss of the relationship with Him. If God’s existence were too manifest, this might cause more harm than good.
Peter Hurford: “This sounds very weird. First, it means Christians are doing something that God cannot do, making it sound like God is not actually all-powerful. It also makes it sound like Christians are either going against God’s wishes, or doing something that God could do better, and it would be in God’s interest to do so.”
God’s omnipotence is certainly restricted by His other properties. So, He has not the power to cease to be omnibenevolent, omniscient and perfectly just. In the Bible we can find passages expressing the idea that there are things God cannot do because they would go against His nature. E.g. according to 2 Timothy 2,13 God “cannot disown himself” (NIV).
As for the question why Christians are supposed to help sinners whereas God is not one might look at the different outcomes such actions would have, depending on whether they are performed by God or by Christians. Whereas the help from God would encourage sinners to continue living an ungodly life, this is rather unlikely with respect to the help from Christians.
Peter Hurford: “Well, the death of this person would cause suffering to others as well.”
But the overall suffering of all the people involved might nevertheless be lower.
Peter Hurford: “Not to mention this means that we have absolutely no interest in having people live to the age of accountability. In fact, it would be better to kill all babies, so they don’t risk the chance of messing up and losing out on the afterlife.”
In the threads below I dealt at great length with this objection. I sent my comments under the names “Patrick” and “patrick.sele”, respectively.
http://www.daylightatheism.org/2011/07/they-have-no-answer.html
http://www.justinvacula.com/2011/08/god-rape-and-problem-of-evil.html
Peter Hurford: “Speaking of which, how would God know that people who die before the age of accountability actually deserve to be in Heaven, and would have chosen good over evil if given the chance?”
In my view anyone who is sinless deserves to be in Heaven. I don’t think that it matters whether or not he or she would have chosen good over evil if given the chance.
Peter Hurford: “If God has some sort of foreknowledge that he can use to do this, why doesn’t God just spend all good people to Heaven and cut out this pointless pit-stop/testing-ground life?”
Here again, 2 Peter 2,4 might provide an answer. From the fate of sinning angels one can see that if one were in Heaven, but nevertheless chose sin, one’s fate would be sealed. So the fact that we are not put immediately to Heaven may be the price we have to pay that we can sin and nevertheless repent and come to God again and again.
Peter Hurford: “This also bothers me because its conveniently not verifiable, so any evil God could just promise that Heaven exists and completely justifies all his apparent evil behavior, and we would have no idea if he was true.”
This idea doesn’t have to be verifiable. For a theodicy to be successful it needn’t been proven true, it just needs to be shown to be logically possible or not improbable given Christian theism.
Peter Hurford: “But what about those who cannot be compensated by receiving rewards in Heaven, like nonhuman animals?”
In my first comment I conceded that my theodicy may only account for human suffering.
Peter Hurford: “Also, what about the fate of those who do not make it to Heaven, and instead are placed in a cruel and unjust Hell?”
In my view the criteria for the degree of punishment in the afterlife as presented in point (7) of my theodicy are not unjust.
@ Peter
Your respond to my question of needless vs. necessary suffering by defining necessary suffering as
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You have made the argument that the only suffering that is ever acceptable is that which the individual autonomously chooses to take on themselves. However, I would argue that the presumption of your argument is a purely rationalist paradigm, one that I find to be flawed.
What is the rationalist paradigm? Rationalism in my own words is the creation of knowledge/truth through the criteria of empiricism. Rather than deducing truth about the world from already held beliefs, the rationalist looks to their sensation of the physical world and events to derive information about it. There are two problems with this: 1) it denies the influence of any type of top-down processing; 2) it denies a diversity in sensatory capacity. I am not going to go too much into the first problem, but here briefly is an example of what is meant.
1) The C_T catches the M_ _SE…
Even though information is missing from the above sentence your perception of what it should say fills it in for you. You probably read it as “The cat catches the mouse” but it could just have easily been “The cat catches the moose.” A much larger cat perhaps, I never clarified if the cat was a house cat, a lion, a saber tooth tiger, etc. A slightly larger stretch for this example, but the first word might not even be cat. “the cut catches the moose… on the eye.” For a cut to catch something is irregular but still within the right context it is decodable in the English language.
It is the second problem that I will focus on for the purposes of this essay. There is not an equal distribution of sensory capacity among humans. Most people are born with a similar set of sensory and cognitive capacities. However within each of these tools there exists a wide performance range. Take sight for example. Most people are born with the capacity of sight, but many are slightly colorblind, nearsighted, farsighted, etc. The sensory capacity of an individual is in no sense normative. The same is true for the cognitive capacities. The rationalist paradigm requires extensive formal training in several cognitive tools. Such training requires proper socio-economic station, as well as proper sensory capacity. Lots of people may have the means to play soccer, but it is a minority that contains the right combination of means, sensory capacity, and dedicated work to hone themselves to the world class level. Just as there are pro athletes, there are pro thinkers. There are people who might have been able to be pro, but lacked the focus, work, etc. There are people who had the means, put in the work, but lacked the skills. The rational argument—which is an extremely individualistic one—completely ignores the possibility of sensory poverty. As you yourself said, rationalist believe “this gets a bit muddled when people have willingness to do things that are based on falsehoods” implying that this is a minority case irrelevant to the overall argument. You ignore the possibility of an individual incapable of autonomously finding truth, when I would argue that this is the majority of humanity. Most normal people are not privileged enough to be able to decipher empirical truth for themselves, and thus it does not make much sense to define necessary suffering by individual autonomy.
I teach 9th graders who cannot read or write. Who do not understand what a complete sentence is. I am desperately trying to teach them how, because it I want to make them as prepared as they can to survive. From their perspective, I ask them to suffer a lot. Reading is hard, it is frustrating, and it is demoralizing. I imagine for them it feels like they are trying to lift 300 pounds without any former training, and some of them are dyslexic. You and other x-rationalists are simply too strong (in terms of linguistic and logical/mathematical intelligence). You probably never have imagined reading and writing as physical suffering, but I guarantee you that for many people it is.
If someone is born with poor vision and you tell them that there is a clearer world for them to see if they would only take your advice and wear glasses, what logical reason do they have to listen to you? They will never be able to empirically verify what you say before having faith in your words and putting on the glasses. The only paradigm of logic they could possibly call on in this situation is one of loyalty. If they trust you, or their community trusts you, then they will take your perception of reality as reality despite their personal sensation. However this is not empiricism. And what happens when the “glasses” are publically obscure and the effects of wearing them are not immediate? What if there was a pair of glasses that you must wear for 10 years before their affect would be clearly visible. For many people education is a pairs of glasses that it takes almost a decade to see the affects of.
However if this is true, if there are situations, important situations, where individuals lack the capacity to autonomously arrive at what benefits them, then your definition of necessary suffering is flawed. There is plenty of suffering that is not immediately logical to individuals.
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Peter I do not follow your logic here. The argument you make is “Suffering that a person would willingly take on in order to achieve something the person feels is ‘worth it’.” At what point did what a person deems ‘worth it’ become “realize a higher good.” You have completely changed your argument.
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I would point out that you have failed to live up to the standards you set in ““The Great Problem of Evil” for defending why curing polio is of the greater good. You make the blanket statement that “when we cured the world of polio, things only got better in quality of life terms.” I don’t think you can say curing polio made people happier, or that it improved the quality of their life. All you could say is that by curing polio the duration of life was extended for more people. Is the extension of life clearly for the greater good? From an individual’s perspective who can imagine possibly dying from polio otherwise, yes, because they do not want to die, but that is not the greater good. That is what it good for their own personal desire. The great good is not what extends the duration of an individual life, or even individual happiness, but what significantly increase the happiness and duration of society as a whole.
To summarize I made the following corrections to your example
1)Curing polio does not improve the quality of life, it extends life
2)The great good is not always found in what is individually good.
The question that remains is: Is the greater good found in extending individual life? While I do not have a definitive answer for this question, I would guess it is not. Why? Well, let’s imagine that we kept extending human life. The consequences are a further scarcity of resources. Imagine an X,Y axis with resources on the Y and Human lifespan on the X. There is probably some function that would determine at what point an increase in X exceeds the capacities of Y. I have no idea how to figure that out. But I do know that we already vastly overpopulate the earth. I know that there are hundreds of millions of people starving every year. So if I were to guess I would say that we are already at a point where we should not be further extending human life.
In this example I proposed a reason for suffering that you have labeled needless; that reason being ecological balance. Can you counter this argument?
I find the rest of your post built off the false assumptions of necessary and needless suffering, so I will stop here until you provide me with a reason to respond to the latter half. I have not yet in this post mentioned God, but I would imagine you could see where my argument is now going.
@Tom Mitchell
“necessary suffering by individual autonomy”
Going from your writing, I’d say you mean sometimes it is ok to make judgements for people as to how much something will benefit them (like the skills of writing, reading etc), versus the suffering it will cause them. I’d guess that’s why a lot of moral systems, I’ve discovered so far, which claim there are objectice moral values, do so on the basis of what rules would be made under a perfectley rational system. It does seem to get you into a sticky ethical situation in that such moral systems will always require their interpretators and dispensers (priests essentially) and enforcers (police), and both of those are open to human flaws and deliberate abuse…
This is what I am saying to some degree, but it is not individual autonomy. Autonomy means you decide things purely for yourself. The requirement of individual autonomy to deem suffering necessary is what I am arguing against.
@Patrick:
First, some concessions and agreement:
I’ll grant you these two responses as completely reasonable and stop arguing the rebutted objection.
However, there still are quite a few unresolved problems with your response that mean the Problem of Evil remains successful.
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Second, I would like to ask for clarification on some confusions I have with your view:
Does this mean that everyone, no matter what they do, suffers an equal amount in their life and afterlife? The sum of suffering(life) + suffering(afterlife) is equal for every single person?
How can someone die on behalf of sinners and make them just? And how does this allow God to be perfectly just and at the same time act benevolently towards everyone, if as you mention God cannot act benevolently toward sinners?
How do you make sense of the idea of omnipotence being restricted? Isn’t omnipotence the ability to do anything without restriction? Couldn’t you say that I’m omnipotent, except I have restricted by physics? Does it not seem odd that there are things humans can do that God cannot?
How much suffering will a dead baby receive in the afterlife? How is it fair that God would let a baby not have an opportunity to improve his or her conditions on his or her own merits?
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Third, my rejoinders on outstanding objections:
The Problem of Nonhuman Animal Suffering:
So what do you think of the Problem of Evil then? Is God acting benevolently toward these nonhuman animals? If not, does that matter in any significant sense? Wouldn’t this be God causing needless suffering?
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God’s Harmful Absence:
But why would this be so? And why would someone who is truly aware of something being against God’s will want to still do that thing — wouldn’t that person be crazy? And what of the people like me who are not aware of God’s existence or will? Am I harmed in any way by not having a relationship with God now? If so, why does God not grant me this relationship?
Again, why would this be so?
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There Being No Reason to Help Anyone On Your View:
I don’t think this is the case — help from Christians either implies an acceptance of what they are doing or indicates that assistance can be rendered without acceptance of the lifestyle, something God could easily do to if he were to help someone but then also re-educate them about the folly of their ways.
Even so, this still gives us no reason to help anybody as long as any harm to them now will be made up for them in the afterlife. It’s not even that we wouldn’t care, it’s just it would be completely pointless for us to bother.
@Tom:
I appreciate your lengthy discussion of the rationalist paradigm, but this isn’t precisely what I would want to argue.
I’m instead trying to distinguish between events that don’t really harm people because they lead to far more gain in the long-term, and events that really do harm people because they are a net-negative throughout that person’s entire life, and that person would be better off without that.
Thus there are cases where a person would be better off doing something he or she doesn’t actually do (get an education, eat healthy, exercise regularly, etc.), but these don’t actually cast doubt on my view. Thus the “higher good” view, which I guess is superior to the “subjectively worth it” view for the reasons you enumerated.
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I think I can actually say this: in nearly all cases, polio makes people less happy, all else being equal. People are, all else being equal, better off without polio. This argument is only confirmed by the rationale for a massive effort to eradicate polio and the universal agreement that deliberately giving polio to people would be a bad idea. Thus polio is needless suffering.
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Polio does decrease the happiness and duration of society as a whole. If you don’t think this decrement is significant enough, feel free to substitute it with something else, like slavery or earthquakes or cancer — the abolishment of slavery, the increase of earthquake monitoring and damage prevention, and the increase in cancer detection and chemotherapy all increase the happiness and duration of society.
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I wouldn’t argue that, but I do think we would rather less people have to suffer if possible.
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I would agree — suffering would likely be better mitigated by curbing population growth and tending to the hungry rather than extending the lives of everyone and not dealing with any other problem. This is precisely why I am not arguing for the naïve life extension view you seem to attribute to me.
@Tom and @Patrick:
Michael Shermer discusses the Problem of Evil in his book The Science of Good and Evil” that I am currently reading. In this book, he asks a good question that I think cuts against a lot of defenses against the Problem of Evil: what exactly would a world with needless suffering look like? What kind of world would we expect to see if God were not all-good? What event could occur that would cause us to immediately doubt God’s goodness?
It seems like completely crazy stuff can happen (The Holocaust, slavery, cancer, hurricanes, the bubonic plague, etc.) and yet this is rationalized as what God wanted because it was necessary for a higher good, for if it wasn’t, it would be needless suffering and thus Christianity is false. Yet, if this stuff can happen, it seems like anything can happen.
This is also why I’m so interested in what the rationale is for believing a God that never takes any direct involvement to educate someone who is about to commit genocide or murder the folly of their ways. Imagine if God had a talk with Hitler about how mistaken Hitler was about God’s will, or if all slave owners were told what they were doing was deeply harmful and contrary to what God wanted…
Given that God could re-educate any wrongdoer or give us technology to prevent any natural disaster or cure any disease, I’m faced with the conclusion that God actually wants these murders, disasters, and diseases. Thus, counter-intuitively, these things are considered good for us. So what can’t be considered good for us, on this view? And why bother working against these things if they’re good for us?
Do you see where I’m coming from?
Peter Hurford: “Does this mean that everyone, no matter what they do, suffers an equal amount in their life and afterlife? The sum of suffering(life) + suffering(afterlife) is equal for every single person?”
I don’t see how this conclusion can be drawn from what I wrote. The more immoral acts one performs, the greater is the overall amount of suffering.
Peter Hurford: “How can someone die on behalf of sinners and make them just?”
I don’t see why this is supposed to be impossible for God.
Peter Hurford: “And how does this allow God to be perfectly just and at the same time act benevolently towards everyone, if as you mention God cannot act benevolently toward sinners?”
As in my view God’s salvation is open to everyone, everyone can bring himself into a position in which God can act benevolently towards him.
Peter Hurford: “How do you make sense of the idea of omnipotence being restricted? Isn’t omnipotence the ability to do anything without restriction? Couldn’t you say that I’m omnipotent, except I have restricted by physics?”
From the omnipotence paradox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnipotence_paradox) one can see that an all-powerful being is a logical impossibility. Not even a perfect being can have this property in an unrestricted way. Moreover, it is justified to treat omnipotence not the same way as omnibenevolence and perfect justice, as the latter are moral qualities, whereas the former is an attribute that belongs to a different category.
Peter Hurford: “Does it not seem odd that there are things humans can do that God cannot?”
I don’t think so, as it is not a lack of power that is responsible for such an asymmetry but God’s moral properties.
Peter Hurford: “How much suffering will a dead baby receive in the afterlife? How is it fair that God would let a baby not have an opportunity to improve his or her conditions on his or her own merits?”
With respect to an opportunity to improve his or her conditions it is only compared to a person having accepted God’s salvation that the baby is in a worse state. But as so far those people who haven’t accepted God’s salvation have outnumbered those who have, compared to the total number of people the baby is in a better state than if he or she would have had the opportunity to improve his or her conditions. But even for those people who have accepted God’s salvation it’s only their state in Heaven that they can improve, the fact that they go to Heaven, however, is not based on anything they do but on Christ’s work of salvation alone.
Peter Hurford: “So what do you think of the Problem of Evil then? Is God acting benevolently toward these nonhuman animals? If not, does that matter in any significant sense? Wouldn’t this be God causing needless suffering?”
As for animal suffering the following points may be worth pursuing:
- Animals or at least some species of animals may not experience suffering in the same way we humans do.
- Cruel as the fact that some animals kill other animal in order to eat them is, it prevents long lasting suffering brought about by disease; it is usually the weakest animals that fall a prey to carnivorous animals.
- Death by means of natural disasters may be another means to prevent long lasting suffering brought about by disease.
- The natural law theodicy may also apply to animals: Even more than humans animals may have to be in a position to rely on lawful regularity in nature. But the same laws that result in beneficial outcomes do in other circumstances result in destructive outcomes.
- It cannot be ruled out that there is also an afterlife for animals. One might argue that the “new earth” mentioned in Isaiah 65,17-25, 2 Peter 3,13 and Revelation 21,1 will be inhabited by animals, and that these animals will have lived on this earth.
As for the first point philosophers William Lane Craig and Michael Murray have provided arguments in favour of it that can be found in the following links:
http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=7215
http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=9229
Peter Hurford: “But why would this be so? And why would someone who is truly aware of something being against God’s will want to still do that thing — wouldn’t that person be crazy?”
From Numbers 14,11 one can see that it is possible, even if it is hard to see why a reasonable person would act like this.
Peter Hurford: “And what of the people like me who are not aware of God’s existence or will?”
According to my theodicy such people are indeed better off than if they rejected God although they would be aware of God’s existence or will.
Peter Hurford: “Am I harmed in any way by not having a relationship with God now?”
According to Galatians 5,16-26 such a relationship helps people to overcome their sinful desires, so without it they cannot experience such moral improvement.
Peter Hurford: “If so, why does God not grant me this relationship?”
In my view the possibility to have such a relationship is open to everyone.
Peter Hurford: “I don’t think this is the case — help from Christians either implies an acceptance of what they are doing or indicates that assistance can be rendered without acceptance of the lifestyle, something God could easily do to if he were to help someone but then also re-educate them about the folly of their ways.”
God already “educates” people about the folly of their ways, namely by providing them with a conscience (Romans 2,14-15) and in addition to this with His written commands in the Bible, which are based on the “Golden Rule” (Matthew 7,12). I still think that if a person received some supernatural help despite immoral behaviour he or she would interpret this as a divine approval of their respective behaviour.
Peter Hurford: “Even so, this still gives us no reason to help anybody as long as any harm to them now will be made up for them in the afterlife. It’s not even that we wouldn’t care, it’s just it would be completely pointless for us to bother.”
But if a Christian’s help makes the sufferer receptive of God’s salvation this would spare the sufferer much more suffering in the afterlife than any amount of further suffering on his or her part would have accomplished.
Peter Hurford: “Imagine if God had a talk with Hitler about how mistaken Hitler was about God’s will, or if all slave owners were told what they were doing was deeply harmful and contrary to what God wanted…”
From passages such as Exodus 20,18-19, Isaiah 6,1-7, or Acts 9,1-9 one may draw the conclusion that for sinful people a revelation from God may be a very frightening experience. Moreover, if someone despite such a revelation refuses to repent, he may be worse off than if he hadn’t had it (see Hebrews 6,4-6). So, God may not be inclined to talk to people.
As for the issue of slavery the following link is very informative:
http://www.mandm.org.nz/2010/04/contra-mundum-slavery-and-the-old-testament.html
Patrick,
I have a lot to say, but I’m going to refrain from commenting on what you’ve written until after my ongoing debate with Cl is over. Then I intend to include all of your comments on the follow-ups I make.